Tracey Stewart’s Animal Planet

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Tracey Stewart at Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, N.Y. Ms. Stewart, who just published her first book, “Do Unto Animals,” is starting a center of her own, in New Jersey.CreditCreditHeather Ainsworth for The New York Times

By Judith Newman

Oct. 10, 2015

WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. — Levi was lying blissed out in Tracey Stewart’s lap — at least I think he was, since a goat’s face is a bit hard to read. “He’s a little needy,” she said, explaining that he had recently been found sick and abandoned. The moment Ms. Stewart stopped petting him, he bleated deafeningly, leaving his pen to trail after her.

A few days earlier, she had been at the Emmys, watching her husband, the comedian Jon Stewart, accept his 11th award in the Outstanding Variety Series category for the last season of “The Daily Show.”

In glimpses of her on camera, she looked pained. “I hadn’t eaten in five hours and my feet hurt from the high heels,” she said. Now, at Farm Sanctuary in rural New York, she was beaming in her manure-stained coveralls.

We were at the preserve for abused animals to talk about Ms. Stewart’s charming first book, “Do Unto Animals: A Friendly Guide to How Animals Live, and How We Can Make Their Lives Better.” It is a memoir and how-to about enriching the world of the creatures in your life, whether they be dogs, cats or the crows in your backyard.

Animals that cause trouble for their humans often end up in shelters. So the book details basic animal behavior as well as practical humane solutions to common animal-human conflicts (cats scratching furniture, moles destroying your lawn).

It also has craft projects for those of us with great intentions and no skills. I may not be able to build a house for mason bees, but I’m pretty sure even I can make a cat toy out of a toilet paper roll and duct tape.

The book is also a kind of payback: Ms. Stewart credits animals for most of the good things that have happened in her life. She grew up in Philadelphia among animal lovers; “Charlotte’s Web” and “Doctor Doolittle” were her bibles.

She was not from a family of readers, so she gravitated toward men whose academic bona fides made her feel a bit better about her own lack. In the mid-1990s she was studying in San Francisco at the California College of Arts and Crafts and living with an Ivy League-educated looker she now calls “Jack Ash.”

Jack spent several years telling her the many, many ways she was not up to his standards, Ms. Stewart said. Isolated in California, with a man who told her she could only be pretty, not beautiful, because the space between her nose and her lips was too long, she adopted a pit bull named Enzo.

“Later Jack said to me, ‘I knew as soon as you got that dog you’d leave me,’ ” Ms. Stewart said. Which is what happened. “Enzo showed me what could be wholesome and good in a relationship,” she said. “My entire life would have been different if it weren’t for my leaving California with Enzo.”

Soon after coming to New York in 1995, she met a young comedian on a blind date. His TV show had just been canceled, so presumably he had his vulnerabilities, too.

She was smitten from the beginning, but there was one problem: Jon Stewart had inherited two cats from a past relationship, and his future wife was desperately allergic.

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Tracey Stewart walks with sheep at Farm Sanctuary, a center for abused farm animals in Watkins Glen, N.Y.CreditHeather Ainsworth for The New York Times

“The fact that he got custody of the cats said so much about him,” Ms. Stewart said. “This was my dream man. But I also knew that because he loved animals, if those animals didn’t like me, that might really count against me. I was like: ‘They’re going to love me. I don’t care if I have hives.’ ”

Apparently it worked. They married in 2000, though there were quite a few years when she did an awful lot of hand washing.

Not that she wasn’t used to it. Soon after Mr. Stewart began hosting “The Daily Show,” in 1999, Ms. Stewart got work as a veterinary technician. The first day on the job, she passed out when she had to hold a Shih Tzu during an unpleasant procedure.

But she persevered. The work “gave me a kind of purpose in this world,” Ms. Stewart said. “And also, I felt macho.”

Animals also gave Ms. Stewart her children — sort of. She had a hard time getting pregnant, she said, so she tried in vitro fertilization.

“Jon had to give me shots, and so to make me laugh he would dress up the animals,” she said. “The cat was Stanley — Stanley Tucci — and he’d put him in a little hat. We called him Nurse Tucci. Then he outfitted my dog Monkey in these surgeon’s scrubs. And Jon wore a lab coat and … well, you’d have to see the photographs.”

Nurse Tucci and Dr. Monkey did their jobs well. The couple have a son and daughter, ages 10 and 9.

Their menagerie at home also includes two horses, two pigs, four dogs, three rabbits, two guinea pigs, one hamster, one bird and two fish (one named Brian Williams).

The four dogs and the children sleep with the Stewarts, so their nights are busy. “At one point I was having trouble sleeping,” Ms. Stewart said, so she went to a doctor. “He asked me about our sleeping arrangements, and then he was like, ‘Uhhh, maybe this isn’t a medical problem.’ ”

Now the kids sleep on a large bed on the floor. The dogs tend to go back and forth. One of these days she’ll do something about this setup. Maybe.

Ms. Stewart was eager to give me a tour of Farm Sanctuary, and to discuss her plans for her own sanctuary and educational center at the couple’s farm in New Jersey. “Before Jon retired, I was going through a bit of a depression and was feeling really not-confident,” she said. She had run a mom-and-baby-centric cafe in TriBeCa called Moomah, but it didn’t hit the sweet spot.

“I knew I needed to work with animals again,” Ms. Stewart said. “I thought about going back to being a vet tech, but the hours are intense and my kids are still young. And living in the city — elevators, cars, noise — there’s just a level of craziness that comes to seem the norm until you spend time somewhere else.”

So when her husband suggested she could get her farm dream a little earlier than expected, she said, “even though I’m frightened of change, we got online and found the place in one day.”

Running an animal rescue facility is a little more involved that having a bunch of cute creatures to pet. There are endless rules and regulations; each type of animal has its own set of medical issues that must be addressed, and if you don’t have the right housing for your animals you will a) attract legions of rats and b) set your place on fire.

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Ms. Stewart, whose new book combines memoir with animal advocacy, cozies up to Romy.CreditHeather Ainsworth for The New York Times

But Ms. Stewart is learning, and building her New Jersey center very slowly. “I’m not going to become the Mia Farrow of farm animals,” she said.

Susie Coston, Farm Sanctuary’s director, took us on a tour of the grounds in Watkins Glen. When I look at 20 cows I see, well, 20 cows; Ms. Coston knows each animal’s name and back story.

Lili and Bradley, rescued from hoarders who had a vague idea about starting a farm, had spent their lives tied up in a stall by their horns. The burns on Jay’s sides were from a transport accident in which the truck caught fire.

There are animals that were blinded, thrown to the side of the road or left to die in piles of other dead animals. Ms. Coston knows them all.

I wouldn’t have guessed it was possible to keep up two hours of baby talk to a baby, let alone to a herd of sheep; but there is nothing these women don’t find endearing about their charges.

“The problem with having these guys in the house is that they eat paper and poop,” Ms. Coston said, apparently speaking from experience, as she petted a pygmy goat. “But look how cute those little pellets are!” One cow has an alarming habit of licking everyone. Cow tongues are very rough. “We call her the Exfoliator,” Ms. Coston said.

Not surprisingly, most of the people here are vegans, including Ms. Stewart. Jon recently became a vegetarian (cheese and eggs, still O.K.), but “he’s a little afraid to say it out loud,” Ms. Stewart said. “He thinks he’s going to be caught somewhere eating meat.”

“I just keep telling him: ‘Eat a burger. Don’t overthink this.’ ” For the Stewarts it is an ethical decision, not a health one, though it has its health benefits, too. But Ms. Stewart wants to be clear that she is not in every way Nature Girl. “Breast-feeding? I did it for just as long as I felt I had to, and then I stopped,” she said. “It hurt.”

As we walked, the women tried every conceivable way to sell me on the beauty of the nonmeat lifestyle. “See that guy over there?” Ms. Stewart said, pointing out a chiseled Adonis-with-a-bun who looked more suitable for a Tommy Hilfiger ad than a farm. “Vegan.” The more they talked, the more I craved a steak.

“I’ll tell you why vegans are so annoying,” Ms. Stewart said, reading my mind. “Imagine for a second you’ve never spent time with puppies and you’re in this culture where it’s the norm to eat them. One day you bring a puppy home. Then you’re like: ‘Oh, my God, what is everyone doing? They can’t eat puppies!’ That’s what it’s like when you start spending time with farm animals.”

Over dinner (no steak, couldn’t do it), we talked about her husband’s retirement. “He hasn’t quite adjusted to being a stay-at-home dad,” she said. “So he’s appreciating me a lot more now.”

I asked Ms. Stewart what she would most like people to take away from her book.

“I’d like people to start to look at animals as individuals,” she said. “If everyone did a bit more, if they fell in love a little bit more, so much could happen. It doesn’t have to be going vegan. You can advocate for them. You can show tenderness. You can play music for them. I really hope people can connect with animals the way most of us did as children.”

That’s the thing about animals we grow close to, Ms. Stewart added: “We talk about taking in ‘rescue animals.’ But the truth is, just as often, animals rescue us.”